Album Covers That Are as Evocative as the Music

EAST HAMPTON, N.Y. — Over a career of more than 30 years, John Berg designed thousands of album covers that helped sell records by Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and other artists and that remain as vivid in some fans’ memories as the music itself.

Covers that Mr. Berg designed as art director for Columbia Records from 1961 to 1985 are currently the subject of an exhibition at Guild Hall in East Hampton, where 95 of them are on display through Jan. 6.

Christina Mossaides Strassfield, Guild Hall’s museum director and chief curator, said it was difficult to choose from among the 500 albums Mr. Berg had at his home in East Hampton. She had not heard of him but was invited over by his wife of 30 years, Durell Godfrey, a photographer who had covered events at Guild Hall.

“He showed me these amazing albums that I had grown up with,” Ms. Strassfield said. She soon learned that Mr. Berg was well known among graphic artists, having won four Grammys and been nominated around 25 times, as well as having received three gold medals each from the Society of Illustrators and the Art Directors Club of New York.

Photo

Credit
Gordon M. Grant for The New York Times

Among the covers she remembered instantly were those for Sly and the Family Stone’s 1973 album, “Fresh,” featuring a Richard Avedon photograph of Sly Stone leaping in the air, and a photograph by Joel Baldwin of a black man holding a white dove for the 1974 album “Santana’s Greatest Hits.”

In an interview at his home, Mr. Berg, 80, who has a rich sense of humor, cited positions as cartoonist for his Cub Scout troop’s newsletter and his Brooklyn high school newspaper as among his design jobs. He later worked in advertising and at magazines before finding his job at Columbia, where he started as art director and eventually rose to the level of vice president.

A gift for easy conversation helped him persuade singers like Barbra Streisand and Mr. Springsteen to agree to using photos he selected, he said: “Among my other accomplishments, I’m a pretty good salesman.” For a 1963 album for Ms. Streisand, he said, “I picked out a picture that had a shadow across the top of her face. I had to sell it to her. Nobody else in the company wanted to touch her with a 10-foot pole. She was famous at that point. So I sold it to her.” It won him one of his Grammys.

Twelve years later, he said, Mr. Springsteen wanted to use a serious photo of himself “that made him look like an author.” Mr. Berg asked to see other images taken by the photographer, Eric Meola, and chose one of the singer holding his guitar and playfully leaning on the back of his saxophone player, Clarence Clemons. That became the cover of the 1975 album “Born to Run.” He stretched the image over the front and back covers, which can be spread flat, as they are in the exhibition.

Photo

Credit
Gordon M. Grant for The New York Times

Ruth Appelhof, the executive director of Guild Hall, said of Mr. Berg, “He’s obviously one of the great tastemakers of popular imagery.” Like Ms. Strassfield, she had not been aware of Mr. Berg by name, though it turned out she knew his work, including the seven Dylan covers on display in the exhibition. (A psychedelic poster Mr. Berg commissioned from Milton Glaser for the 1967 album “Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits” is also in the show, as is a two-hour video of Mr. Berg being interviewed at Cooper Union, his alma mater, in 1994.)

Mr. Berg said he tried to make each cover different. For the Dave Brubeck Quartet’s 1963 “Bossa Nova USA,” he used only type and no picture at all. Often, he had not heard the music because an album wasn’t ready yet, and based his cover on the title or a conversation with the artists. For “The George Benson Cookbook” of 1966, he said, he took his cue from “cookbook” and suggested that the George Benson Quartet pose with vintage kitchen appliances, which the group did. He was sitting with members of the Byrds in a cafe in Los Angeles when suddenly “I saw them as chrome life masks,” he said. “I just had the idea.” They agreed to have molds made of their faces — which involved light greasing and hot wax — for their 1971 album “Byrdmaniax.”

As with most of the album covers he designed, Mr. Berg did not execute the idea. He is usually credited with art direction, graphic design or both. However, for Charlie Byrd’s 1966 album, “Byrdland,” he drew a musical score with tiny birds as the notes. No one else could get it right, he said. The original illustration now hangs in a bathroom in his home.

Mr. Berg also came up with the idea for the logo for the band Chicago, he said, recalling that he asked that it be made to look “exactly like the Coca-Cola logo,” which it resembles. And while he wanted each of the group’s album covers to look different, he placed the logo in the same position and in the same size on each one “to see how many people caught the trick.” No one did, he said. The logo is shown in the exhibition on seven covers in different incarnations, including imprinted on a chocolate bar, stamped on steel, embossed in leather and as part of a thumbprint.

Whether visitors to the museum are fans of Chicago or of Ms. Streisand, Ms. Appelhof said, they “linger and linger, remembering the music as they look at an album cover, and probably their experience when they first heard it. It’s so personal.”

“John Berg” will be at the Wasserstein Gallery, the Museum at Guild Hall, 158 Main Street, East Hampton, through Jan. 6. Information: guildhall.org or (631) 324-0806.

A version of this article appears in print on November 25, 2012, on Page LI16 of the New York edition with the headline: Album Covers That Are as Evocative as the Music. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe